Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do good people suffer, if Job “righteous” and God’s exemplar servant (literally) is not able to avoid wrong. Who can?

Who can?

This story is pre-Jesus, there is no savior taking on the troubles and heartaches in a way that we can see (not yet anyway)…so this story is about the reality that human life is hard and that bad things happen to everyone the good and the bad (the rain shall fall on the righteous and unrighteous alike).

It is a comfort, though,

It is a comfort to know that if Job can suffer, then we do not need to be ASHAMED of our suffering…those who suffer from mental illness, addiction or long term debilitating illness, those things are not shameful

Yelling at God when things go wrong…that’s ok too. After all, God can take that anger and turn it into praise (only God can turn anger into praise in Psalm after Psalm after Psalm)

Because God is Grace, God is the stooping God, the kneeling parent, the carrier in the sand. We are NEVER going to be perfect enough for God. But God will always be perfect enough to help us to get to him.

This why we have communion…to connect us to God even when we feel unconnected.

The earliest written communions have sursum corda (“Lift Up Your Hearts”) which is still included today

Lift up Your Hearts

We Lift Our Hearts to the Lord

Let us Give Thanks to the Lord Our God

It is right to give our thanks and praise.

Lift our hearts…we are lifting our hearts…and we are also praying that God lifts our hearts with us, because we can’t lift them up high enough. God stoops. God helps us

When we celebrate communion we speak to God’s Godhood, how God was the beginning and the end, how God was, is and will be present with us.

Then we pray, we pray for the Holy Spirit to come to the elements, we ask for God to fulfill that promise of presence here and now. Giving a prayer of Great Thanksgiving just as Christ did before he broke the bread and passed the cup, and praying the prayer that Jesus himself taught with the Lord’s Prayer

….lifting our hearts to meet his…God meets us…in the bread and in the wine, Christ is present, promising particular and real presence in the elements.

“This IS my body broken for you…do this in remembrance of me” To remember who Christ is NOW, not just the past

“This is the cup of the new covenant sealed in my blood…whenever (whereever, however) you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim my death until I come again” in the future…this is a seal of my promise to you and your promise to me…proclaiming the death, til the end of time….

and we share in those elements, and we become the Body of Christ…so that Christ is no longer simply with us. This broken ragged people, in different situations with imperfect bodies and hearts that are often in pieces….God lifts our hearts, moves us to celebrate his love, so that we too end up in giving thanks and praise….

We are the Body of Christ.

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About katyandtheword

Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant for 6 years, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ.
She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible.
"Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal.
Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.
"Hallows, not Horcruxes" Harry Potter